Recently, a use of hydrogen has drawn attention as a clean energy source. However, hydrogen is gas that is not condensed in room temperature. Therefore, it is difficult to transfer and store hydrogen, which has become an obstacle to the use of hydrogen. Accordingly, various methods of, for example, compressing to high pressure, condensing at low temperature, and using a hydrogen storage alloy and chemical hydride, have been proposed. Meanwhile, these methods have both advantages and disadvantages.
In view of such a situation, a use of a carbon material has been attempted as a hydrogen storage material. In order to synthesize the carbon material having a high hydrogen storage capacity, it is necessary to design and synthesize the carbon material at a molecular level, specifically for example, to synthesize the carbon material having an ordered structure at a micro level. A conventional aim is to synthesize the carbon material mainly focusing on carbonizing existing materials such as pitch that is a heavy aromatic compound obtained from oil and coal and general-purpose polymers, so as to achieve an intended structure and property as much as possible. Thus, it is difficult to synthesize the carbon material designed at the molecular level by such a conventional synthesizing method.
As for the method of synthesizing a mesoporous carbon material having an ordered structure, a method using mesoporous silica as a template has been proposed (Roo R, et al., J. Phys. Chem. B1999; 103: 7743-7746, Lee J, et al., Chem. Commun. 1999; 2177-2178). This method can synthesize a mesoporous structure with regularity, however, cannot synthesize a microporous structure with smaller pores and regularity. Therefore, the group of the inventors of the present invention has proposed a method of synthesizing the microporous structure by using Y-type zeolite as a template (Japanese Patent No. 3951567, Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. 2003-206112, Kyotani, et al., Chem. Commun. 2000; 2365-2366, MaZX, et al., Carbon, 40: pp. 2367-2374 (2002)).